In 'A Beijing Man in New York'
(Beijingren zai Niuyue), China's popular 1993 tele-series, the protagonist Wang Qiming,
a man on his way to making a fortune after a train of failures
and betrayals, hires a New York prostitute. She is white, blonde
and buxom. Wang decides to take some of his frustrations out on
her. While thrusting himself onto the prostrate prostitute, Wang
showers her with dollar bills. As the money swirls around the
bed, Wang demands that she repeatedly cry out: 'I love you'.

Reportedly, this was an extremely popular scene with mainland
audiences, in particular with the Chinese intelligentsia. (1) It
is also the type of encounter that has a certain paradigmatic
significance about it. It could be argued that by having his way
with an American whore while buying her endearments with a shower
of greenbacks, Wang Qiming's action is the most eloquent recent
statement (and inversion) of the century-old Chinese-foreign
dilemma. (2)

This tele-series appeared at a time when both the Chinese
authorities and segments of the population were becoming
increasingly irate about their (perceived) inferior position in
the New World Order and the attitude of the United States. (3) To
an extent the series is a reprisal of the Boxers without any
belief system. It represents the coming of age of Chinese
narcissism, and it bespeaks a desire for revenge for all the real
and perceived slights of the past century. (4)

In their representation of China as a nation ruthlessly violated
by Western imperialism after the Opium Wars, from the mid-19th
century onward many literati pointed out that China's military
and spiritual weakness had made it an easy prey to aggressive
foreigners. Questions of racial and political impotence have been
central to Chinese thought and debates ever since. (5) Reformist
and revolutionary movements in China over the past century have
been born of a passion for national independence and strength.
Most of the ideologically contending groups in China have,
despite ideological clashes and heated debates, essentially
pursued similar nationalistic goals. (6) A number of issues
central to debates of the late Qing, in particular those that
unfolded during the two reform periods (the Hundred Days Reform
of 1898 and the Qing Reform of 1901-07), including such questions
as political change, limiting central power, new economic
policies, and so on, have been the object of interest since the
late 1980s. (7) So, too, it is argued by some mainland academics
that the overwhelming popularity of lengthy fictional works
related to late Qing figures like Zeng Guofan in recent years
stems from a mass yearning for a new strongman to lead China. (8)
To an extent the early 1990s nostalgia for Mao Zedong is also a
reflection of these mass sentiments.

The end of the Cold War has seen the revival throughout the world
of national aspirations and interests; developments in China have
certainly not occurred in isolation. The rapid decay of Maoist
ideological beliefs and the need for continued stability in the
Chinese Communist Party have led to an increased reliance on
nationalism as a unifying ideology. But whereas throughout the
1980s the Communist Party emphasized its role as the paramount
patriotic force in the nation, (9) mobilizing nationalistic
symbols and mythology to shore up its position, by the 1990s the
situation had altered. Patriotic sentiment is no longer the sole
province of the Party and its propagandists. (10) Just as
commercialization is creating a new avaricious social contract of
sorts, so nationalism is functioning as a form of consensus
beyond the bounds of official culture. But it is a consensus that
for the time being at least benefits the Party. Both economic
realities and national priorities call for a strong central state
and thus tend to give an ideologically weakened Communist Party a
renewed role in the broader contest for the nation.

Since 1989 there has certainly been an erosion of the authority
of the Party-state, but it could also be argued that attempts are
being made to reformulate and broaden the basis of national
authority as the ambit of what constitutes 'patriotic' becomes
greatly expanded. This is obvious in the Party's strenuous
efforts at patriotic indoctrination and 'state-of-the-nation
education' (
guoqing jiaoyu
), (11) aimed particularly at workers and the young. This
movement was launched by Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin
after the Tiananmen protests (12) and climaxed in late 1994 with
the publication of the Party's 'Outline for the Implementation of
Patriotic Education'. (13) Enterprising businesspeople from
Hainan and Beijing reacted to the official patriotic outpouring
in a manner in keeping with present Chinese economic realities by
announcing that they were planning a patriotic theme park in the
capital. (14)

A period of relative political stability and intellectual
stagnation has combined with economic frenzy to create the
possibility for a rough-and-ready confluence of interests under
the umbrella of patriotism. While many prominent dissidents are
still banned from returning to the mainland and others are
periodically persecuted in China - in particular when their
activities among workers threaten the status quo - there are
those who can travel freely and have become involved in various
business ventures. One could speculate that it is only a matter
of time before some aberrant exiles will be welcomed back into
the fold as 'patriotic Overseas Chinese' (
aiguo huaqiao
).

In the broader context of Chinese society, since 1989 there have
been numerous indications of a growing disenchantment with the
West and its allies. People have been sorely aware that the
post-'89 transformation in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union
has not been as rapid or as positive as first expected. As in
many other parts of the world, there is a general belief that the
West, its values and systems, have not made that much difference
to post-Communist countries. For those who supported the 1989
student movement, there is the added realization that if China
had then successfully undergone a major political upheaval, the
nation could well have been faced with the disorder that now dogs
Russia's rulers.

Coupled with this is the underlying sentiment that the world
(that is, the West) owes China something. Past humiliations are
often used as an excuse to demand better treatment from the West.
This has been repeatedly revealed in official Chinese responses
to the question of human rights abuses, in particular in the
White Paper of 1991. (15) The popular Mao cult that flourished in
the early 1990s had a perceptible anti-foreign edge to it. Mao
ruled a China that was effectively closed off from the West, and
he instilled in the nation a sense of pride and self-worth that
it has lost as the result of Deng's open-door and reform
policies. While Deng is admired for what he has done for the
economy, Mao is revered, among other things, for keeping the
superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, at bay. (16)

The demand for better treatment from the international community
was particularly obvious during China's Olympic bid in 1993 when
the mainland media called on rest of the world to 'give China a
chance' (
gei Zhongguo yige
jihui). The internal propaganda campaign emphasized the primacy
of a unique Chinese national spirit and the ability of the people
to 'move mountains and drain the oceans' in their quest to create
a perfect homeland (
jiayuan
), a paradise on earth. (17) The eventual failure of the Chinese
bid was deemed to have been orchestrated by Western bullies, and
the Olympic Committee's decision to give the 2000 Olympics to
Sydney was seen as an affront to Chinese national sentiment (not
to mention a lost business opportunity). (18)

While nationalist sentiment is repackaged and flourishes, the
clamp-down on oppositionist opinion in the media after 1989 has
meant that few divergent voices have an outlet in any wide-based
public forum. Mass opinion is thus formed either by the salacious
tabloid press and electronic media or by classified publications
and news sources that reinforce accepted dogma and
politico-cultural stereotypes. Although intellectuals have
regrouped and produced a number of significant publications since
1992, the diversification of the Chinese media and the wholesale
commercialization of the non-propaganda media have meant that
their impact is marginal at best. Without public intellectuals or
public debate, few of the more extreme opinions that do appear -
for example, those of Yuan Hongbing in his 1990
Winds on the Plain
(discussed below) or Wang Shan in his 1994 book
China Through the Third Eye
(19) - get challenged except by pro-Party propagandists.

At the same time, as the older comrades and their dated politics
fade from the scene, a major generational and ideological shift
is becoming irreversible. Until now, narrow sectarian
fundamentalists - people like the veteran propagandists Hu Qiaomu
(recently deceased), Deng Liqun and Xu Weicheng, as well as
elderly political figures like Wang Zhen (recently deceased) -
favoured some form of ideological constraint on the unbridled
passions of national aspiration and economic power. But the
Maoist worldview that gave China some form of vision and sense of
self-worth has been dismantled and lacks committed advocates.
(20) What remains is a crude pre-World War I positivism that has
been revised since the late 1970s and further enhanced by the
international media's myth-making and hype regarding the economic
and cultural rise of 'East Asia'. There is a faith in science,
material wealth, capitalism and national strength. It is a faith
tempered neither by the moderating influences of traditional
culture nor, for all the talk about China's burgeoning middle
class, by any modern bourgeois angst. Nationalistic and
ultra-nationalistic sentiments are now found across the political
spectrum, and we can speculate that many of the individuals and
groups who hold such views have a following in the broader
society. This essay will attempt to reflect the range of
expression that such sentiments take.

Oriental, Orientalism

It's a state of mind/ It's peace of mind/ If you don't
mind/ Orientalism
It's east and west/ Forget the rest/ So can you guess?/
Orientalism (21)

Much of the more serious cultural/nationalist debate that has
unfolded in the mainland Chinese media since the early 1990s has
appeared in the pages of a number of journals that are based
mostly in Beijing. These include
Dushu
[Reading], the oldest 'liberal' monthly, which has weathered the
extraordinary ideological upheavals of the reform period; the two
main organs of Chinese-style 'national studies' (
guoxue
), (22)
Zhongguo wenhua
[Chinese Culture] and
Xueren
[Scholar]; (23)
Dongfang
[Oriental], the joint effort of a coalition of cultural
conservatives and 'liberals'; and
Zhanlüe yu
guanli [Strategy and Management], a publication edited by
younger conservatives, the latter two journals both first
appearing in 1993.

While articles and dialogues published in the more easily labeled
'liberal' journals like
Dushu
and
Dongfang
generally skirt the issues of one-party rule and
authoritarianism/totalitarianism, or only discuss them in the
oblique esoteric code common to the media in a repressive
environment,
Zhanlüe yu
guanli is more direct in its approach. The general tenor of the
many articles in its pages on the subject of nationalism (24) is
that the single-party state you have is better than the
free-wheeling chaos you do not. Its editors and many of its
writers are troubled by the lack of morals, spiritual vacuity and
cultural lawlessness in China today.

In the first issue of Zhanlüe yu guanli, Wang Xiaodong, one of the journal's editors, rebuffed Samuel P.
Huntington's notion that future world conflicts would be
primarily cultural in nature, dividing the world into the West,
Islam and Confucian cultural blocs. (25) Wang denies that China
can meaningfully be classified as a Confucian nation/civilization
and asserts that there is no desire on the part of the Chinese to
Confucianize the rest of the world. He notes that Western values
and civilization are generally welcomed by the Chinese, apart
from instances where their transmission involves economic or
other forms of imperialism. Any future conflicts will depend on
economic interests. Ideological, cultural and other clashes, he
claims, are and will remain little more than a guise for clashes
of national interest. (26) He argues that China will come into
conflict with other powers because of its present economic
strength and potential, which will make it seem a threat to the
United States. He quotes Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia,
commenting that following the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the emergence of one superpower, small countries have no choice
but either to be obedient to that power or to resist it. (27)

Wang notes that over the past decade Chinese intellectuals have
generally sought foreign nostrums as a solution to China's
dilemmas. According to these intellectuals, the greatest obstacle
to China's progress is a vaguely defined collection of 'national
traditions' (
minzu chuantong
). But Wang questions: what happens if the Chinese come to
perceive that there are active exterior obstacles to this
'garnering from the outside' (
waiqu
)? Such obstacles might be expressed in terms of trade, migration
or some other form. His argument uses references gleaned from the
novelist Bao Mi's apocalyptic view of China's future as presented
in the popular futuristic
samizdat
novel
Huanghuo
[Yellow Peril] (28) which is concerned with a war that results
both from a struggle for resources in South China and
international conflicts. (29)

Others, like Xiao Gongqin, the Shanghai-based historian who came
to prominence in the late 1980s as a supporter of 'new
authoritarianism', are more restrained. From the early 1990s
onward, Xiao has issued warnings about the dangers of weak
central government control. Xiao has pointed out that local
mafias, corrupt police and economic cartels will soon have the
country in a stranglehold and Beijing will be increasingly
incapable of imposing its will. Xiao sees no solution in Western
nostrums or in any political alternatives to firm Party rule. He
has written on the role nationalism can play during the present
period of 'ideological transformation' in China. (30)

Wang Hui, another critic of Huntington, commented in the same
journal that the culturalism of Huntington's argument and the
critical tendencies of Orientalism, introduced into China in the
early 1990s, have been conflated by Chinese intellectuals and
have added fuel to the debates on nationalism. (31) One of the
most important points raised by writers like Wang Hui is that
Western theories presently being introduced to China, including
much post-modernist theorizing, although challenging and
relatively subversive in the context of the West, can be used to
advance or consolidate cultural conservatism in the present
Chinese environment (32) or, as the Shanghai academic and
cultural critic Xu Jilin has said, be yet another 'subterfuge in
the cultural cold war' (
wenhua lengzhande dunci
) with the West. (33) In early 1995, the London-based academic
Zhao Yiheng published a lengthy critique of how what he calls
Western 'post-studies' (
houxue
) had aided the development of a new conservatism among mainland
intellectuals. (34) There is an ever-expanding literature on a
range of 'post-' subjects in China (post-structuralism,
post-modernism, post-colonialism, and so on) and, as a number of
critics like Zhao have noted, such theoretical strategies are
more often than not used to validate the place of mass commercial
culture in the society and negate the independent and critical
role of the informed intellectual. (35) This plethora of
Sino-post-modernisms, it could be argued, serves members of the
intelligentsia as a means for abdicating their role as critics, a
role that has often proved uncomfortable and even dangerous in
the past. At the same time, theoretical approaches like
post-colonialism are used to affirm the value of local and
nativist cultural elements (
bentuhua
, as it is termed in Chinese, or 'sinicization') and even, one
could speculate, a cultural and political
status
quo - and to reject 'Western' thought (socio-cultural as well as
political) as colonizing, imperialist and altogether unsuited to
Chinese realities. By redefining intellectual debate in terms of
'Chineseness', these mainland disciples of post-modernism (36)
lend conservative and nationalistic discourse a cloak of
up-to-date respectability.

Given the cultural confusion in China today, it is little wonder
then that the works of Edward W. Said (37) have been so well
received. From mid-1993 onward there has been talk of Said's work
on Orientalism and the imperialist West's distortion of Middle
Eastern and Asian Others. A group of intellectuals writing in the
January 1994 issue of the 'liberal' journal
Dushu
averred that the deployment of Orientalism is something pursued
only by marginalized Western and minority intellectuals who are
trying to validate their own flimsy cultural positions. Sun Jin,
a scholar of theology, expressed what seems to be a fairly
widely-held view: when China becomes a truly strong nation,
niggardly theoretical and intellectual questions like
Orientalism, Post-modernist discourse, and talk of a global
Centre and Periphery will be easily dealt with. Then, and only
then, it is argued, can China enter into an equal dialogue with
the world.
But for many, an equal 'dialogue' with the outside world is seen
as virtually impossible. A number of noted Chinese writers from
Lu Xun onward have commented on exchanges with the outside as
reflecting either a slavish mentality or an attitude of pompous,
unquestioning superiority.

Self-Hate and Self-Approbation

The religion of the Chinese today is cheating, deceit,
blackmail and theft, eating, drinking, whoring, gambling and
smoking.... We think any honest, humble gentleman a fool and
regard any good person who works hard and demands little in
return as an idiot. Crooks are our sages; thieves and swindlers
our supermen.... there are no greater cynics than the Chinese
people.

He Xin, quoted in Barmé and Jaivin,
New Ghosts, Old Dreams
, pp. 213, 254 (38)

Many Chinese pride themselves on being the harshest and most
perceptive critics of themselves. There is a powerful, if
hard-to-define, tradition of self-loathing in China. Its roots
can be found in the late Ming Dynasty of the 16th-17th centuries
when some literati used the language of Buddhism and Confucian
thought to engage in self-reflection. (39) From the mid-19th
century this impulse of self-criticism surfaced again. For over a
century there has been a vigorous trend in both popular and
intellectual circles to denounce the Chinese and China. In 1897,
Tan Sitong, a young political reformist who was later martyred
for his activities, saw the fate of China in Buddhist terms:

A calamitous destiny is now unfolding in China. It has been
brought about by the evils committed by generations of
tyrannical rulers, and also by the karmic deeds of the people
during incalculable cycles of transmigration. When I look at
China, I know that a great disaster is at hand. (40)

These sentiments are reflected in the writings and comments of
many Chinese writers this century (the names Lu Xun, Li Zongwu,
Li Ao, Bo Yang, Lung-kee Sun, Long Yingtai and Liu Xiaobo come
readily to mind), (41) and it is common to hear such remarks
whenever politics, the economy, culture or the future of the
nation are privately discussed today.
For many people, there is a sense that China has somehow fallen
from grace, that the glories of the longest continuing
civilization (summed up in the popular mind by the phrase 'five
thousand years of history') are buried in the past and can in no
way help China cope with its position in the modern world. The
legacy of this history is felt to have been exposed as impotent
when the Qing court was confronted with the military and economic
might of other nations. The complexities and wealth of the
written language and its culture have been felt by such critics
to be a barrier to communication with the rest of the world. The
political and social legacy of some two millennia is often
characterized by the words 'feudal' or 'Confucian', deemed a
deadening weight, forming a 'deep structure' that stymies change,
repressive and ultimately conducive to neither social nor
political harmony.

According to this view, every element of Chinese reality only
adds to the crisis that is endemic to Chinese civilization, and
one so profound that widespread economic development does not
necessarily alleviate it. The list of problems is long and
harrowing.
The population is catastrophically large. The political system
(cosmetic Marxist-Leninist socialism with the characteristics of
a police state) hinders the development of a mature society that
can live rationally with the wealth that the economic reforms are
creating. Environmental problems are of such a magnitude that
they may well condemn future generations to illness and poverty.
An arbitrary legal system relies on government whim and personal
connections coupled with an erratic police mechanism that
combines elements of Maoist draconianism with both traditional
and modem methods of coercion. The media lacks independence and
serves either Party fiat or fritters away its energies on
consumeristic and cultural trivia; journalists devoted to the
higher calling of pursuing truth and justice in their work are
persecuted and hounded into silence. The carpet-bagger,
get-rich-quick mentality of both private entrepreneurs and large
numbers of state cadres are self-centred, short-sighted and
unprincipled. This murky soup of a society is overseen by a Party
leadership ridden with nepotism and one that rules according to
the precepts of clan elders (a 'Chinese mafia', as some Chinese
have dubbed it). It directs the life of the nation through a
bureaucracy of such size and labyrinthine structure that it is
little better than an administrative 'black hole'. The
educational tradition sanctifies learning by rote, and the
educational ills have been aggravated by a utilitarian approach
to knowledge. In the society at large there is a widespread lack
of sympathy for the disadvantaged and poor, coupled with
malicious jealousy of the successful; an interest in the new that
is satisfied by buying up foreign technology and gadgets; a
fascination with strong rulers and a pseudo emperor cult without
a system of succession that can ensure political stability. This
self-critique is topped off with laments concerning the Chinese
populace's complacency about the depth and seriousness of the
crises facing the country. (42)
This modern tradition of self-loathing is widespread and
powerful. Born of a deep-felt anxiety over material backwardness,
military weakness and political inadequacy, those engaged in this
self-loathing recognize the role of the colonial powers in
China's crisis but tend to look for the origins of the nation's
troubles internally and in historical terms. Under Mao
moral/political supremacy had been seen as an answer to China's
dilemma and the key to ensuring that the Chinese were not
'expelled from the human race' (
kaichu qiuji
); (43) with Deng's reforms, material strength coupled with the
innate and abiding moral power of the Chinese world is believed
by many to be the only way to overcome the nation's various
inadequacies. However, there are intellectuals who feel that
without systemic change and political reform, not to mention
national moral reconstruction, no amount of wealth and power will
make China a 'modern' or responsible country. During the late
1980s, articles and books dealing with a powerful sense of
impending national crisis, by authors ostensibly troubled by the
mood of nihilism born of a rejection of the Party-state,
repeatedly claimed that unless something was done the Chinese may
finally be 'expelled from the human race'.

Self-loathing satisfies a need to explain China's woeful modern
history while at the same time reaffirming a prevalent sense of
national uniqueness. Shame, weakness and aggrieved sentiments of
national humiliation are devices that are regularly used by
propagandists and politicians to inculcate patriotic ire. It is
not surprising then that not all the views on the differences
between China and the Western Other are macho and self-assertive.
Wang Shuo, the Beijing novelist and master of irony, chortles
about the superiority of the Chinese tradition of
self-destruction. A writer who has delighted in excoriating
Chinese foibles, from 1988 Wang made national nihilism into
something of a hip youth cult, satirically validating as a
national achievement China's all-pervasive corruption. Wang has
claimed that the Chinese know how to abuse themselves better than
anyone else. In a book-length interview published in 1992, he
remarked in a tone of smug abnegation:

Generally speaking, foreigners are pretty naive ... They're
materially extremely wealthy, but impoverished in the realm of
spiritual culture. They've just cottoned on to smoking dope,
and that's an artificial form of stimulation! We Chinese know
how to get our kicks out of self-annihilation. (44)

According to this view, which entails a kind of celebratory
cultural determinism, China has not been able to inherit and
utilize the past creatively yet remains different from every
other nation in the world in that it has greater problems, a more
complex burden of tradition and a more vile populace. In this
there is also a strong streak of
Schadenfreude
. Hannah Arendt summed up this attitude in regard to a nation
traumatized by recent totalitarianism, analysing the German
situation in 1950, and it adumbrates an attitude readily found
among the urban elite of China:

...
Schadenfreude
, malicious joy in ruination. It is as though the Germans,
denied the power to rule the world, had fallen in love with
impotence as such, and now find a positive pleasure in
contemplating international tensions and the unavoidable
mistakes that occur in the business of governing, regardless of
the possible consequences for themselves. (45)

Many of the aspects of self-loathing were reflected in
Heshang
[River Elegy], the highly-controversial six-part documentary
series that was screened in 1988. (46) 'River Elegy' gives a
sweeping overview of the nation's history, symbols and
contemporary ills. Later denounced by the authorities, the
series' reflections on China infuriated conservatives and
nationalists throughout the Chinese commonwealth. The debate
concerning 'River Elegy' provided the first public occasion when
ideological opponents on the mainland and in Taiwan shared a
common response out of a sense of wounded national pride. One of
the key elements of the series was that it equated older
civilizations (China, Egypt, Africa, and so on) with decadence,
non-competitive economies and backwardness. This rhetorical
device was aimed, on one level at least, at provoking the viewer
into a patriotic response and feelings of outrage that the
'Chinese tradition' along with past Party policies have combined
to reduce China to its present (1988) status. (47)

In short, one of the recurrent themes of 'River Elegy' was the
sense of frustration and hopelessness that its
intellectual-journalist writers felt about the failure of China
to have become a powerful, modern trading nation. The series'
critique of the traditional polity and its ideology, along with
its oblique references to the present regime, can be construed as
being an indictment of both the past and present systems'
inability to turn China into a modern international power. (48)

While a number of the writers behind the series, including Su
Xiaokang and Jin Guantao, have moved in different directions
since leaving China in 1989, it is interesting to note that Xia
Jun, the China Central TV director of the series, having
weathered the storms of the post-Tiananmen purge in Beijing,
teamed up with the reportage writer Mai Tianshu to produce two
acclaimed peasant-based tele-documentaries. 'The Peasants' (
Nongmin
) and 'The East' (
Dongfang
) (49) are multi-episode documentaries made in northwest China
and produced in 1992 and 1993 respectively. Filmed in southern
Shanxi, one of the most ancient agrarian cultural centres of
China (the 'Hedong' - 'east of the Yellow River' - area in
southwest Shanxi), the makers of 'The East' limn a Chinese rural
world marked by its cultural integrity; a pre-modern Chinese
civilization not disrupted or atomized by social upheavals,
political uncertainty or chaotic modernization. Commentators on
the series have remarked that after seeing 'The East' it is
evident that it is the 'peripheral world' which should now
succour the spiritually depleted 'centre' of mainstream culture.
Mai Tianshu, who wrote the series' narration, calls for a
rejection of theories introduced from the West (he hints but does
not specify that Marxism-Leninism is included in this blanket
condemnation of foreign thought). (50) One commentator notes that
the significance of a work like 'The East' is that it
underlines

the most significant stage in the spiritual evolution of
Chinese intellectuals in the closing years of this century:
they have abandoned the fleeting perspective of pseudo-Western
tourists looking down on their own land and instead now look
thoughtfully to 'Mother Earth'; they have gone through the
baptism of enthusiastically accepting all fads of Western
thought and returned to their native soil, the land that has
nurtured our Chinese culture; they have left behind romanticism
and passion in favour of practicality and rationalism; they
have turned from cultural criticism to cultural construction
and conservatism. (51)

The world that 'The East' reveals, however, is hardly a utopian
pastoral idyll suffused with cultural value and abiding lessons
for urban dwellers. Behind its veneer of folksy voyeurism, the
series affirms some of the most backward-looking, pre-modern
aspects of the Chinese rural world, including male domination,
semi-feudal social hierarchies and educational inequalities. Both
series present a loving portrayal of peasant culture and
traditional values that reflects some of the most conservative
dimensions of the 'national essence'. Of course, such native-soil
conservatism is hardly unique to these television documentaries.
China's 'new wave' directors like Zhang Yimou, (52) Chen Kaige,
Tian Zhuangzhuang and Li Shaohong have been creating works that
contain undeniable elements of rural nostalgia (and voyeurism)
for years. Their own complex brand of cinematic chauvinism (one
that is informed both by the tradition of self-hate and national
narcissism) fits in neatly with a film industry that was born of
nationalist aspirations in the 1920s and 1930s. (53)

Elements of self-hate and moral disgust, as well as the more
commonly reported aspects of protest and rebellion, were crucial
to the student-led demonstrations of 1989. For large numbers of
intellectuals and students, the movement seemed to provide an
opportunity for the educated elite to move back onto the
centre-stage of Chinese history after decades of being persecuted
and sidelined by the Party. For their part, many Beijing citizens
supported the protests in the belief that the peaceful
demonstrations showed that the Chinese had a moral sense, were
willing to stand up for questions of principle and, with a
concerted effort, could overcome the negative legacies of both
the imperial and socialist past. As the students so rightly
claimed, the movement had a powerful patriotic and redemptive
message, one which played a key role in mobilizing mass support.
(54) With the failure of that movement and the continued
stability (and transformation) of Party rule, it is not
surprising that an entrenched pattern of political activism in
20th-century China has reappeared once more, one in which
political activism and extremism once frustrated are transformed
into egregious nationalism. (55)

The massacre of 4 June 1989 led for a time to an affirmation of
the key elements of national self-hate: the innocent young
slaughtered by an unresponsive and entrenched gerontocracy which
was ruling over a nation that is corrupt, chaotic and, above all,
not 'modern'. The chance for a national redemption had been lost
and with it the moral force and legitimacy of the rulers.

Prior to the upheavals of 1989, there was a vocal pro-Western
lobby in China. While some of their number went into exile after
4 June, many who were previously politically engaged and remained
on the mainland have tried to take personal advantage of China's
impressive economic performance, reasoning that money-making is
not only a viable
modus
vivendi but also a revolutionary act that may presage true
reform. In late 1993, a number of intellectuals in Shanghai
launched a discussion on the 'loss of the humanist spirit' (
renwen jingshede shiluo
) in China. (56) They lamented the fact that the
commercialization and de-politicization of culture had
marginalized serious artistic issues and, as we have noted above,
that post-modernism was being sinicized by mainland intellectuals
and writers who used it as a theoretical validation of their
political disengagement, cowardice and moral neutrality in regard
to the state. (57)

The widespread interest in the 1980s among the reading public in
faddish Western theories like psychoanalysis, existentialism,
structuralism and deconstruction had now dwindled. It was argued
that intellectuals had suffered a new displacement in terms of
social position and prestige from 1989 and that in the 1990s
those who did not become involved in 'abstract debates' (
qingtan
or 'idle talk') about theory were busy themselves either hawking
their talents in the market place or attempting to exercise a
more overt political influence as 'strategists' for present or
future powerholders. (58) A mini-debate on this question of
'humanism', social commitment and moral perfectionism was sparked
by Zhang Chengzhi, the Beijing-based Muslim novelist and
proto-nationalist, when the leading Shanghai daily
Wenhui bao
published a vociferous attack by Zhang on the greed, vanity and
lack of patriotic backbone among Chinese intellectuals and
writers. (59)

From the early 1990s onward, following the nation's increased
economic growth, there has been a new twist in this tradition of
self-loathing. People observe that China continues to advance
economically without embarking on a drastic reform of the
political or social system, and the debate about the 'humanist
spirit', mentioned above, was part of a cautious attempt by some
thoughtful intellectuals to air these fears in public. There are
many who believe that the acquisition and maintenance of wealth
will gradually transform the 'national character', or at least
obviate the need for any major shift in the public perception of
the national character. (60) Consumerism as the ultimate
revolutionary action is seen by many as playing a redemptive role
in national life, for it enables people to remake themselves not
through some abstract national project but through the
self-centred power of possession.

Whereas there was a strong spirit of self-reflection in the
1980s, economic success in the 1990s coupled with restrictions on
intellectual debate and political repression have encouraged a
sense of bravado. The national spirit that is being reformulated
in the 1990s is not one based on mature reflection or open
discussion but rather on a cocky, even vengeful, and perhaps a
purblind self-assurance.

The faith in Chinese exclusivity is reflected even in that
particularly Westernized art form: Chinese rock'n'roll. Cui Jian,
the godfather of the Chinese rock scene, has claimed that
northern, Beijing-based rock is completely different from Hong
Kong and Taiwan imports. He averred in an interview published in
late 1993 that northern Chinese can produce a robust, positive
and socially progressive type of music that is quite different
from the negative and decadent rock of the West. (61) Other
song-writers like Hou Muren, and Kong Yongqian, the designer of
the controversial 'cultural T-shirts' (
wenhuashan
) of 1991, have pursued their work not because they want to
overthrow the status quo as such, but rather to enrich the
cultural sphere of China and make their nation more competitive
with the rest of the world (including other areas of the Chinese
commonwealth: Hong Kong and Taiwan). The authorities may view
their cultural products as divisive and dangerous, but in the
larger realm of China they are actually patriots. Others, going
further, are emerging as super-patriots.

Yuan Hongbing: Pissing in the Wind

This race that dwells on the continent of East Asia once
shone with a brilliance bestowed by the sun. Now it has its
back to the icy wall of history, driven there by the forces of
Fate. We must prove whether we are an inferior race or not, for
now Fate is pissing in our very faces. (62)

Today, radical views do not necessarily issue from pro-Maoist
ideologues or conservatives. One firebrand is Yuan Hongbing, a
lawyer formerly at Beijing University and labour organizer, whose
involvement with a 'Peace Charter' reportedly modeled on the
Czechoslovak 'Charter 77' (63) and detention in February 1994 put
him in the front ranks of China's small public dissident
movement, (64) although his philosophy is more akin to New Age
Nietzscheanism than liberalism. (65)

Yuan was one of the organizers of the controversial publication
Lishide
chaoliu [The Tide of History] in 1992, noted for its
anti-conservative, reformist tone. (66) Yet an earlier volume
authored by Yuan entitled Winds on the Plain, which appeared in 1990, is perhaps more revealing
of his mindset and that of some of his coevals. (67) Seen by some
readers as a philosophical tract of considerable individuality,
in the repressive intellectual atmosphere of post-Tiananmen China
it soon gained a considerable following among university
students. (68)

In the book Yuan propounds what he calls 'new heroicism' (
xin
yingxiong zhuyi), a cause that is primarily concerned with the
'fate of the race' and the strongman as national hero and
saviour. (69) Like Nietzsche (a philosopher whose high standing
among Chinese intellectuals has a long history), he talks of the
need for madness and irrationality. (70) Yuan condemns all
individual attempts to achieve freedom as a betrayal of the race,
whether it be to engage in politics or to flee China in search of
a new life. He condemns those who seek from the West a solution
to China's problems. Indulging in what could be called
'Sino-fascism', (71) he proposes that the answer to the
political, social and cultural 'ugliness' of the Chinese is
purification through fire and blood: total warfare 'even if this
creation means that our blue skies darken with the colour of
blood that will not fade for a thousand years'.

In Yuan's vision, the first step toward national renewal is a
'totalitarian style' (
jiquande xingshi
). 'Only with totalitarianism will it be possible to fuse the
weak, ignorant and selfish individuals of the race into a
powerful whole'. The race needs strong, idealistic, dignified and
free men to achieve this end. In his own formulation of the
neo-authoritarian/conservatism debate that has developed in China
since the late 1980s, (72) Yuan says that his
soi-disant
'freedom fighter' must be crowned by a 'democracy' that he uses
to break the nexus between totalitarian rule and
authoritarianism. This hero must put the welfare of the race
above all other concerns, including those of the family. (73)
Indeed, race is an easy way of coping with the complex legacies
of cultural superiority, political exclusivity and self-loathing
that have been discussed. By emphasizing race, the question of
humanity is happily circumvented, as are all of the knotty
problems of political, social and personal morality and ethics
that are germaine to it. (74)

Winds on the Plain
shares much in common with other views that are inward-looking
and reject the outside world apart from the economic benefits
that can be reaped from a relationship with it. As Yuan remarks
when putting the case against the West: 'Scientific rationalism
has said all it can within the context of Western civilization'.
(75)

While couched in excessively purple prose, few of the views Yuan
expresses in this book - one that was banned by the authorities
for its 'bourgeois liberalism'! (76) - are particularly new, or
Chinese. Nor are Yuan's views on male primacy (77) and racial
strength unrelated to earlier trends among the priapic proponents
of the avant-garde in the early 1980s. The well-known 'misty'
poet Yang Lian's 'Nuoerlang' cycle of poems, although set in
Tibet, gave voice to Han male dominance, and something of Yang's
tone is reflected in the recent writings of another poet, Zhou
Lunyou. Known as a dissenting writer since his advocacy of
Not-Not (
feifei
) poetry in the mid-1980s, the Sichuan poet Zhou Lunyou was
jailed following 1989 and after his release published an attack
on post-Tiananmen cultural trends. (78) Lambasting the
raffishness championed by Beijing writers like Wang Shuo, Zhou
calls for 'red purity' (
hongse chucui
) in a tone of self-righteousness not that dissimilar to the
tenor of Yuan Hongbing's work. Zhou came out in favour of a
robust, 'muscular' poetry, pitting himself against all that was
weak, effete and clannish in the Beijing and regional arts scene.
(79)

A Beijing Bastard in New York
(80)

'By the way, fuck you!' (81)

In 1993, the intellectual portrayals of the national spirit were
overshadowed by a tele-drama that brought into focus many of the
questions discussed in this essay. This was 'A Beijing Man in New
York', referred to in the opening paragraphs of this essay.

This tele-series involved the archetypical trip by a hero to
foreign parts, where he overcomes adversity, obtains fortune and
sires offspring by ravishing beauties, leaving behind a legacy of
riches and empire. (82) Wang Qiming, the protagonist of the
series, gives birth not to a lineage as do the heroes of other
travel-and-conquest epics but to wealth, the legitimate product
of his labours in New York and the means whereby the perceived
cultural malaise and social impotence of China, as embodied by
Wang, (83) a disheveled Beijing artiste, are mollified. For Wang,
money = wealth = potency = self-validation = continuity. The
series enthralled audiences. Its tone also fortuitously fulfilled
some of the needs of post-1989 propaganda - as well as satisfying
popular curiosity and prurience - in that it depicted the horrors
of Western capitalism at the same time as affirming the positive
dimensions (rags-to-riches) of the market economy which China is
pursuing with such energy.

Official and semiofficial reviews of the series generally
concentrated on aspects of Sino-American differences, emphasizing
that the work 'focused on conflicts between Chinese and Western
culture, psychology, and concepts of values' and that it would
'help Chinese TV viewers better understand American society and
help those who entertain a rosy American dream to become more
realistic'. (84) China's physical poverty, wrote one commentatory
in
Dushu
, will give birth to many people like Wang Qiming, but the
spiritual vacuity of New York will force more people to search
for spiritual values. (95) But one critic who writes for both the
mainland and Hong Kong press commented that the unifying theme of
the series can be summed up in one line: 'Screw you America' (
Meiguo, wo cao ni daye
). (86) And audiences - bureaucrats, masses and intellectuals -
with a few vocal exceptions were at one in their praise of the
show.

Wang Qiming, the protagonist of the series, is forced to give up
his wholesome Chinese values to be successful in America. (87)
Yet his success shows how those native values have informed his
actions and help him maintain a certain superiority and humanity
quite absent from the foreigners characters in the story. And, in
reality, Wang retains elements of what is quintessentially
Chinese - expressed in both negative and positive elements of his
personality - despite the ravages of American commercial life. Xu
Jilin, a Shanghai critic, summed up a large segment of
intellectual opinion when he wrote that Wang was in fact the
television embodiment of Wang Shuo's 'ruffians' or 'smart-arses'
(
pizi
). (88) Xu also opined that the intentional misrepresentation of
the United States validates a view of reformist China that is
increasingly common among the Chinese themselves: the world
created by a competitive market economy, the model of which is to
be found in the United States, is one in which there are no
ground rules, no morality or rectitude, a place where the strong
devour the weak.

Conclusion: There's No Time Like the Future

As the children of the Cultural Revolution and the reform era
come into power and money, they are finding a new sense of
self-importance and worth. They are resentful of the real and
imagined slights that they and their nation have suffered in the
past, and their desire for strength and revenge is increasingly
reflected in contemporary Chinese culture. Unofficial culture has
reached or is reaching an uncomfortable accommodation with the
economic if not always the political realities of contemporary
China. As its practitioners negotiate a relationship with both
the state in all of its complex manifestations and capital
(often, but not always, the same thing), national pride and
achievement act as a glue that further bonds the relationship.
The patriotic consensus, aptly manipulated by diverse Party
organs, acts as a crucial element in the coherence of the
otherwise increasingly fragmented Chinese world.

For decades Chinese education and propaganda have emphasized the
role of History in the fate of the Chinese nation-state. While
many Chinese disciples of post-modernism and post-colonialism are
busy talking themselves out of a role as social and intellectual
critics of the traditional and Communist heritages to which they
are the heirs, the ideology of progress, national wealth and
power continue to inform public opinion. History and its
supposedly inexorable workings determine for China a triumphant
march toward a strong and modern future in which all of the
progressivist dreams of the past century - and the promise of
Chinese civilization - shall supposedly be realized. While
Marxism-Leninism and Mao Thought have been abandoned in all but
name, the role of History in China's future remains steadfast.

In the late 1950s, China's utopian hopes were to surpass Britain
and America within decades. In the Cultural Revolution, China
became the centre of world revolution and publicly deemed itself
the most 'progressive' force on the international scene. (89)
Now, it is the 'Asia-Pacific century' that beckons and beguiles.
(90) The new mythology of East Asian material strength and
spiritual worth touted equally by regional propagandists and the
Western media feeds into the century-old Chinese dreams of
national revival and supremacy. Whatever the economic and
political realities of that future may be, it is important to be
aware that the cultural attitudes and awareness that form the
basis for the attitudes of Chinese across political specturm have
been shaped by defunct Party propaganda and express
deeply-frustrated and compelling nationalistic aspirations. This
is evident in the official Chinese media today, as well as in the
mass media, and non-official intellectual and cultural circles.
It is likely to be evident too in the future, regardless of the
political direction the country happens to take.

Canberra
July 1995

*In 'Zhunbei haole ma?' [Are you ready?], a recent
émigré Chinese interviewee tells the writer Sang Ye
that Chinese students and other Chinese mainlanders she had
encountered in Australia 'think that to screw foreign cunt is a
kind of patriotism' (
cao waiguo bi ye suan aiguo ma
). See Sang Ye, 'Zhunbei haole ma?,' translated by Barmé
with Linda Jaivin in Sang Ye
, The
Year the Dragon Came (Brisbane: Queensland University Press,
forthcoming, 1966). Some of the material in this essay appeared
in Barmé, 'Soft Porn, Packaged Dissent, and Nationalism:
Notes on Chinese Culture in the 1990s',
Current History
(September 1994), pp. 273-5. My thanks to the reviewers of
The China Journal
- Chris Buckley, Frank Dikotter, Michael Dutton, Andrew Nathan
and Jeffrey Wasserstrom - who offered a number of insightful
comments and suggestions on the draft of this paper, as well as
their encouragement. I am also grateful to Jonathan Unger and
Anita Chan for their editorial work on the piece.